An introduction

Welcome to globaldev, the website of the Global Personals Development Team. We’re a team of web professionals building online dating websites and tools as part of Global Personals in the UK.

Our own home

This is our own little place to talk about the things that interest us, to give something back to the community and to blow our own trumpets when we’ve done something we’re proud of.

So why launch our own team website? We believe that, among other things, a good website or blog should have a distinctive voice, a clear audience and a strong focus. Our company website is squarely targeted at the dating industry and media and has therefore never been the right medium to write about development topics.

This new website, however, is created, designed and written entirely by our development team and is deliberately aimed at developers like us.

Spreading the word

We’ll be writing about our experiences in developing and maintaining our core product, WhiteLabelDating, a large, high availability web app with over 3 million registered users around the world on 4000+ live dating websites. We’ll also be sharing how we’ve used latest technologies and methodologies to meet the demands of an expanding company, plus discuss the issues we face around growing the team and our skills.

Although a lot of our work is public facing, our company name itself isn’t well known and this website is unashamedly positioned to shout about our team, the people and the work we do. We want to attract great talent to join us and by promoting ourselves we’re hoping to inspire others to want to work alongside us.

Beyond the blog

We wanted to add a bit more colour and detail to the website than just articles, but without making a fussy, deeply layered website with navigation and “contact us” pages.

So we decided to make the most of all the decentralised services that we already use. On the homepage we link to open source projects and code from our developers on GitHub, photos on our team Flickr photo pool and tweets from our @globaldev Twitter account. Where applicable, we also link off to each team member’s website/blog and their individual accounts.

What’s next

We’re planning a whole series of articles over the weeks and months ahead. Our challenge is to keep the site active and relevant and so we’d be happy to hear from you (via Twitter or globaldev@globaldev.co.uk) if there’s an area you’d like us to cover.

About the Author

Barry Frost is the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for Venntro and heads up
the Development teams in Windsor and London.